The email that generated the previous post, Interesting new Windows 7 features … But only for Starter and Home Basic, got me thinking. Why was this particular control panel so different across different Windows 7 product editions? To see what the differences really were, I took a shot of the Display control panel task list in each version, and then created this image, which shows each side by side…

Project Management

Dr. Jame Brown has an opinion piece on the current state of PMBOK(r) 4th Edition. I’ve read and reviewed Dr. Brown’s book The Handbook of Program Management. The book is a "must read" for any serious project or program manager. The PMBOK(r) article has a critically important point

Project Management is nothing but structured organized common sense!

This is one of the best statements about project management I’ve heard in awhile.

I’ve discovered the site Mosaic Projects. There is a wealth of material that I’m starting to go through. A useful paper is titled Links, Lags, and Ladders. It is about the topology of project schedules. In Microsoft Project there are many ways to link tasks with each other. This paper describes a few and speaks to the outcomes of these choices. Here in Space and Defense, there is only ONE way to link work together.

FINISH to START

Now to say this is the ONLY way is a bit of a stretch, but every effort is should be made to use FS for task connectivity. There is one critical reason for this:

The start of any future work that depends partially complete previous work, usually results in rework.

Project & Project Server 2007

Microsoft Office Visio 2007 WBS Modeler is intended to improve the project planning process by giving the opportunity to generate Project Plans from a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) using a graphical representation of elements.

You may know you can update the formatting of the current gridlines you see in Project, but did you also know that you can add additional gridlines? While in the Gantt chart, go to Format – Gridlines and you can see in the list of "Lines to Change" everything that you can format. To get the line to show up, just set Type to something besides blank. I wanted to callout a few useful lines that aren’t on by default…

The Gantt Chart view is the most commonly used view in Project. It lists the tasks in your project, and illustrates their relationship to one another and the schedule using Gantt bars. Let’s look a little more closely at each portion of the view.

Checklist for deploying Project Server 2007 updates – This checklist describes the general sequence in updating a Project Server 2007 farm deployment to the most current update. It also gives references to other articles that provide detailed guidance and procedures for installing various type of Project Server 2007 updates.

Walkthrough: Deploy Project Server 2007 to a server farm environment – This article contains a white paper and a four-part video series which provide a walkthrough of a typical Office Project Server 2007 deployment. The white paper contains step-by-step instructions for each step necessary to successfully deploy Office Project Server 2007. While the scenario described in the white paper may differ from the deployment scenario that you plan to use for your organization, you can gain significant hands-on experience by following the steps described herein in a test environment.

Do you have a need to print only parts of a Web page, for example only selected Web Parts in a SharePoint page? Then you might be interested in a free add-on proposed by Hewlett-Packard, called HP Smart Web Printing. It works on Internet Explorer and Firefox. Here is an excerpt from their site: Print what you want, how

In Word 2007, there is a potentially hidden tool that can help you quite a bit. Most people know about the Document Information Panel (DIP), but did you know there’s a Document Management Panel? Check out this two minute screencast to see how the Document Management Panel displays information about a SharePoint Word document.

Nessus

Many of today’s latest worms and viruses are using interesting methods to propagate across the network. For example, the Conficker.A / Downadup worm sets up a web server for victims to connect to and download a copy of the malware. What I find interesting about this method is that no matter what request is made to the HTTP server, it responds with a Microsoft executable file. Nessus detects such an HTTP server with plugin id 35322 "HTTP Backdoor Detection"…

Tenable’s products can be used in a pro-active manner to help protect your network, as described in the following previous posts to the Tenable blog:

2) How did you test for MS08-067? – Details how to test your network for the MS08-067 vulnerability using Nessus. This can be done using either network or credentialed scanning.

3) USB Device History Auditing with Nessus – If you believe the worm was spreading via the usage of USB thumb drives, the methods described in this post could help you track down the offending USB drive.

Miscellaneous

For quite a number of years, Carlota Perez has been predicting the inevitability of the financial crisis that ultimately engulfed us. An expert on the historical links between technology and socio-economic development, she is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, as well as being affiliated with the University of Sussex and a number of other institutions,

“this time we have had the boom and crash in two episodes. The first was the Internet mania which was truly fuelled by new technology and ended in the NASDAQ collapse of 2000. The other was the set of easy credit bubbles of 2003-08, when investors were pushed by an abundance of quasi-free money into finding anything but technology as an object of speculation (from commodity futures to securitized sub-prime mortgages). The enormity of this financial bubble was facilitated by the process of globalization and the capacity for computer-aided financial "innovation" acquired during the NASDAQ boom. It is because regulation did not follow after 2000 that free-wheeling finance was able to reach such astonishing levels of systemic risk. It is only now, when all the crooked doings of the casino have been revealed and their painful consequences for the real economy are being suffered, that there is enough political pressure for regulation and institutional recomposition.”

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Steve Mullen has been involved in information technology for over 35 years. He is also actively involved in the music program (voice and English hand bells) and Vestry of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Damascus, MD.

One comment on “Links for April 6, 2009”

An impressive share! I have just forwarded this onto a co-worker
who has been doing a little homework on this. And he actually bought
me breakfast simply because I found it for him…
lol. So let me reword this…. Thanks for the meal!! But yeah, thanx for spending some time to discuss this subject here on
your internet site.